Violent extremism in Greece: focusing on the far-right

Rising xenophobia amongst the public has supported the impunity tacitly
accorded by the state to far-right violence.

Perhaps the most challenging
domestic security issue facing Greece today is the presence and emboldening of violent far-right militias and gangs.
Incidents of far-right violence in Greece saw a steady ascent in the 2000s,
overwhelmingly targeting immigrants but also leftists and anarchists. By 2009,
far-right platoons of thirty to forty men dressed in black and armed with
sticks had established a regular presence patrolling immigrant-dense
neighbourhoods of Athens, unchallenged by the police, intimidating local
shopkeepers and residents and engaging in violent assaults against immigrants
and their property. Other attacks on immigrants and their property (from the fire-bombings
of places of residence and worship to beatings and stabbings), and violent
assaults against leftists and anarchists, have been carried out by smaller
groups of vigilantes, who are often also reportedly black-clad.

Since 2009, Greece has seen what
NGOs have characterised as the steepest ascent in racist violence in Europe. Within
only the first six months of 2011, NGOs in Athens claimed to have treated at
least 500 victims of racist attacks, and over 200 racist attacks were
additionally recorded between October 2011 and December 2012 by a network of
NGOs headed by the UNHCR. In late 2012, the UNHCR characterised the level of
racist violence as ‘alarming’, whilst the US Embassy in Athens went so far as
to warn US citizens residing in or travelling to Greece of a heightened risk of
attack for those whose complexion might lead them to be perceived as foreign
migrants.

Behind the platoons and the
smaller groups carrying out far-right attacks is alleged to be the political party
Chrysi Avyi (‘Golden Dawn’), an extreme nationalist movement that entered
parliament for the first time in 2012, with 6.9 percent of the vote and
eighteen MPs. The party, whose members dress in black, uses language and imagery
redolent of Nazism, and is openly sceptical about parliamentary democracy, as
well as being vocally racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, and virulently opposed
to those on the left of the political spectrum.

To date, however, although the
party has sought in different ways to build upon its association with violence
– such as by taking a fully supportive stance towards the actions of the
party’s spokesman after he physically assaulted two female left-wing
politicians on live television, and by using footage of participation by its
MPs and other party members in coordinated attacks on the market stalls of
immigrant traders for publicity purposes – the party has commonly denied
responsibility for the many organised assaults causing serious bodily harm that
have been perpetrated by typically black-clad groups of vigilantes.

Mainstream denial

There has been longstanding
campaigning by human rights organisations to see the existence of organised
far-right violence in Greece recognised and treated by the state as a menace to
the security of individuals, as well as to public order more generally. Yet successive
centrist governments have tended to refute or downplay the issue.

As recently as December 2010,
officials and prosecutors from the Ministry for Citizen Protection rejected the
notion that racist and xenophobic violence was a serious or growing problem to
representatives of the NGO Human Rights Watch.

Whether in terms of organised
far-right violence as such, or racist violence in particular, the Greek state
has long failed to monitor, record, prosecute, effectively punish perpetrators
and appropriately compensate victims. For a full thirty years, for example, not
a single published legal judgment applied Law 972/1979, which provides for ‘the
punishment of acts or conducts aimed at racial discrimination’ (the first known
application of the law in criminal courts took place in 2010). It was only
following sustained pressure by NGOs and the media over the course of 2012, resulting
in international publicity spotlighting far-right violence, that the Greek
state finally announced in January 2013 the appointment of a special prosecutor
to address racist crimes and the establishment of police units to monitor
racist violence.

Alongside this development,
however, the government has maintained a regressive agenda against immigrants,
including through the use of intense police operations and by suspending
citizenship applications from children over the age of six who were born in
Greece of immigrant parents.

Even now, moreover, there has
been no hint of prospective state action against the broader category of
far-right violence. Assaults by far-right groups against homosexuals and
leftists remain unmonitored by the state, for instance, and the organised nature
of far-right violence is not subject to particular scrutiny by law enforcement.

Despite the established presence
of violent far-right groups repeatedly associated with brutal attacks on Greeks
and foreigners in the country, the Greek state does not acknowledge the
existence of violent far-right organisations in its monitoring of political
violence. Unlike many of its European counterparts, for example, Greece has not
notified EUROPOL of attacks by extremist far-right groups on its territory.

This omission has had a
significant impact in distorting analysis of, and responses to, the terrain of
political violence in Greece. Official policy and practice, as well as
scholarly analysis, has focused almost uniquely upon the actions of violent far-left
and anarchist groups. Similar to the experience of other states in western
Europe, the vast majority of recorded incidents of violence perpetrated by
far-left and anarchist groups in Greece since the 1970s have involved the use
of explosives against symbolic targets, causing few casualties or fatalities. According
to official records, the number of such attacks rose from 13 in 2008, to 15 in
2009, and 20 in 2010, but fell over the course of 2010 and 2011, when only 6
attacks were recorded.

Nevertheless, mainstream
political discourse in Greece has increasingly resounded with demands that the
threat posed by violent far-left and anarchist groups be equated with that from
far-right extremists, whilst rising xenophobia amongst the public has supported
the impunity tacitly accorded by the state to far-right violence.

This piece was originally published by the Extremis
project. For further analysis, see Sappho Xenakis, ‘A New Dawn? Change and
Continuity in Political Violence in Greece’, Terrorism and Political
Violence, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2012), 437-464;
Sappho Xenakis and Leonidas Cheliotis, ‘Spaces of Contestation: Challenges,
Actors and Expertise in the Management of Urban Security in Greece’, European
Journal of Criminology, Vol. 10, No. 3
(2013, forthcoming).

About the author

Sappho Xenakis is Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London. Her research explores the intersections between international and national ‘non-traditional’ security concerns, with a particular focus on policy and practice in the fields of transnational organised crime, political violence, and corruption. In addition to the co-edited volume Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Greece: International Comparative Perspectives, her published work on Greece addresses trends in political violence, urban security challenges, policy against organised crime, normative hybridity and perceptions of corruption, and patterns of state and public punitiveness from a political economy perspective.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.